isBlog

Max’s teacher sent me this excellent picture of her hard at work writing a report on China.

Been a biut of a while since I posted. Not a whole heck of a lot to say. For those that are interested, here are the highlights of what’s going on in my life:

• JB (Jelly Bean) is doing well. I felt the first kick this weekend! We had a doctor’s appointment on Friday morning for a quick sonogram and everything is going well. We still haven’t found out JB’s sex and don’t want to. We’re now at 21 weeks and looking solid. We need to get moving on refinishing the nursery.

• As far as the house is concerned: work continues. I’ve been doing a lot of work on the yard lately, not so much inside. The bare patches in the back 40 are filling in nicely, and I planted 12 boxwoods along the front yard to give us a nice hedge which makes the front of the house look slightly less hideous. At least now it looks like someone cares. We got an estimate on painting the exterior and some parts of the interior, which we read and laughed over. We’ll do it ourselves and take a vacation for that amount of money.

  Laying the floor in the basement has really paid off – while we were watching the game last night, Beth mentioned that she really likes that room now, and that’s before repainting or finishing the baseboard heaters. It’s the job I’m proudest of so far.

• The Red Sox dropped 2 out of 3 in the recent series with the Yankees, and it’s particularly painful because the win came as a result of monkey-boy (Alex Rodriguez) hitting a solo homer in the top of the 9th. Of course, that only puts the Yankees 12.5 games back from the Sox and 1 game ahead of the last-place Devil Rays, so no reason to start hand-wringing yet. Especially given how badly the Yankees fall apart when things go wrong. Second-place Toronto is 10.5 games back, so we still have a pretty nice cushion. And I know it’s still early, but I’d love a post-season without the Yankees. Far as the Yankees are concerned – as Yogi Berra once said: “It’s getting late awfully early”.

  Have I mentioned that the mlb.com site is not only miserably designed but painfully slow? Why is it still so hard for people to get websites reasonably well-done in this day and age?

• Been learning Ruby in preparation of moving further into Rails (I did some quick test stuff with Rails and was pleased with the results). I’ve looked at some other web-development frameworks (most notably CakePHP) but I’ve noticed that none of them really made code easier to manage or resulted in fewer bugs or faster development time that my own home-grown framework.

  After years of developing in PHP, Ruby is a liberating. Even at the initial stages, the language is a joy to use and incredibly powerful. I look forward to eventually ditching PHP altogether and moving all my development to Ruby/Rails.

• As an adjunct to the above, I’m pushing again to get Max and Lucas to learn programming. My experiment with Logo wasn’t terribly successful – I would need more time than they were willing to give to get them walking on their own with that language. However, I’ve found a great alternative teaching tool, based on Ruby: Hackety Hack. It should be released for the Mac this month, so Max, Lucas and I will all be learning Ruby at the same time.

• Work is going great – I now have two major projects going on: adding mapping to the core application and extending functionality on the State House video servers. Reasonably interesting work, although I still get frustrated by the other small jobs that keep coming in and taking time away from these.

We went to the Doc’s recently. Everything is still right on track as far as Jellybean’s development. No surprises, baby and mom are both healthy and doing great. One thing – while the Doc says that JB’s size is almost dead median, Beth does seem to be big for having 3 months to go. We get a lot of “Wow” when we tell folks baby’s not arriving till October. Whether this means a big baby or an early delivery, we don’t yet know. I’ve attached a picture of Beth that everyone’s been asking for so you can judge for yourself. On another note, Jellybean has started doing a lot of moving around. We playa fun game some nights: Beth lays on the bed and I put my hand on her belly, and do a light squeeze and jiggle. Jellybean usually responds with a kick or arm poke, and then waits for the next squeeze and jiggle. It’s pretty wonderful to be able to communicate with our child already.

UPDATE: Beth says that she’s not insane – she was making a silly face in that picture.

my birthday, Beth gave me a wonderful little camera – an Olympus Stylus 720sw. It’s a point-and-shoot camera with a few extra features, which is what I really want. I’m more about getting the picture than fiddling with setting to create the perfect shot. The killer features on this camera are the rechargeable battery, the huge dispay, and the fact that it’s incredibly tough, sealed against dust and sand, and waterproof (!) down to 30 feet.
I was a little worried about the size – it’s bigger than the (disontinued) Sony DSC-U50 it’s replacing. But it turns out to be just as pocketable. I took a few shots at the beach with it, and I have to say that it’s nice to be able to hand the camera to the kids and not have to worry about it being damaged. The kids actually took some of these shots.
Battery life is pretty solid, at least for my type of usage. It’s a bit of a bummer to not be able to buy batteries and drop them in – it uses a custom-size Lithium Ion rechargeable, requiring a special plugin charger, but I’ve yet to run out of juice, even with that huge 2.5″ screen. It includes AV-out cables so you can share the pictures on the camera with others via a TV screen. Being the clever lady that she is, Beth also included a 2-gig memory card, so even at the 7.1 megapixel resolution I can store about 200 pictures on the camera before needing to tether up to my mac. Works great with iPhoto.
Overall a great addition.

Pictures from the Olympus 720sw

I am now officially 41 years old. *sigh*

Had a really nice birthday / Father’s day. Beth and Max and Lucas made a cake for me, and Beth gave me a really nice present: a tough little digital camera to replace my beloved Sony DSC-U50. For Father’s day, I received something I’ve wanted for a while: a shiatsu massager seat cushion. It feels awesome, really relieves the tension and tightness in my back.

It was a great day – lots of hugs and kisses all around. And the cake was very good. I have a wonderful family.

Here are a few more pictures of JB, done with a really high-resolution sonogram at Beth Israel Hospital (!). Be warned – clicking on the links to the high resolution images will pop open a *really* big window and may take some time to download.

Amazing how quickly these little guys develop. Beth and I have taken to calling the baby “Jellybean”, based on the last set of sonograms. Not accurate anymore, but I have a feeling the poor kid will be stuck with the name for life now. Could be worse. Could have been “Seahorse” or “Lizard”. At any rate, here are some more sonogram pictures to check out.

Lucas went to a birthday party today, where all the kids were asked to wear their favorite color. Being the crazy man that he is, he wanted to kick it up a notch. This meant we had to rush around Boston on a Sunday morning to find a place that sold temporary red hair coloring. Newbury Comics FTW, but you probably already knew that. I certainly didn’t – that’s why I married into cool. Beth knows where to get anything in this city. At any rate, we wound up spraying-painting Lucas’ hair in front of Emack & Bolio’s, and made it to the party just in time.

Of course, Max also needed to get some blue streaks. This is the end result. And yes, it all washed out with a little shampoo, although the explanation of why he couldn’t go to school like this was a lengthy one.

Doesn’t he look a bit like Billy Joe from Green Day?

As you can see, there’s a new peanut in the Alvarez Family. We went to the doctor’s last Thursday and got this picture (click to enlarge). I know it’s not much to look at yet, but we’ve gotten a few requests to see the latest addition, and this is what we have. The doctor estimates that Baby is 8 weeks old in this picture. That means baby’s birthday will be right around Mom’s. We did get to see and hear the baby’s heartbeat – incredibly fast, but strong.

Beth has been feeling reasonably well so far, no real morning sickness. She has been amazing – dealing with work, pregnancy and the move with her usual style and class. She sure looks great, even if she doesn’t believe me when I say it.

So it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted, a full year. A lot of things have happened in that year. New job (at Sage Systems), new house, and a few other things which I’ll save for later. I finally got the isLog up and running again and am pretty happy about that. I have a bunch of things I’ve been wanting to write about lately, so it seemed appropriate. And hopefully I’ll find a decent gallery tool that plays nicely with Wordpress and iPhoto and put up some pictures soon.

Not sure if anyone even reads this blog anymore but that’s ok too – my main audience is myself and my kids when they grow up. A little window into what Dad used to be like.